Even today, the information that emerges about the Nazi concentration camps is difficult to comprehend. The Third Reich’s leadership and its personnel services appear to have deliberately selected sadists to run these camps, granting them the freedom to act on their cruelest impulses. In Dachau, one of the oldest camps in Germany, operating from 1933 to 1945, there was a doctor named Sigmund Rascher who, in his brutal inclinations, rivaled the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele of Auschwitz.
Rascher was obsessed with experimenting on living people. He could spend hours watching a man submerged in icy water up to his neck, then attempt procedures meant to rescue the frozen prisoner. As a rule, the procedures failed and the subject died, but this did not trouble Rascher much; another victim was always ready to take the place of the deceased. He infected prisoners with malaria, tuberculosis, dysentery, and typhus, deliberately allowing the diseases to develop to their final stages before beginning what he called treatment.
He injected the sick with poorly studied, newly created drugs that had never passed any serious tests. The mortality rate was high, and those who survived had nothing to hope for, as they remained living material for further use. A colleague of Rascher’s at Dachau, a Dr. Heiner, also conducted so-called research.
On one occasion, on his order, ninety Roma prisoners were selected and deprived of food and water, given only seawater to drink. Within a few days, they were so dehydrated that they licked the washed floor with their tongues to capture any remaining moisture, a sight that greatly amused him. According to prisoner recollections, those suspected of speaking ill of Hitler faced particular torment. The camp had informers among the prisoners, and those accused were dipped upside down into barrels of sewage and feces.
Such torture could last for hours until the prisoner choked completely. Beyond the experiments and the grueling labor, prisoners lived under the absolute rule of the staff. The camp guards and their henchmen, policemen recruited from traitor prisoners who agreed to cooperate in exchange for privileges, became executioners themselves. They delighted in sadistic entertainment, even targeting defenseless children.
Guards organized siren games: at the sound of a siren, children had to run to the barracks where their mothers were, but as soon as they arrived, another siren sounded, ordering them to return to their own barracks. Any child who arrived late was beaten with a baton or kicked. Another form of entertainment was murdering children in front of their mothers. These inhumane acts were used to punish a mother for any offense or disobedience.
The executioners took the child by the legs, spun him around, and hit his head against a table or wall. Mothers often could not endure such torture and took their own lives. Drunken guards also held races, harnessing prisoners to carts. The teams, made up of men, women, or children, were forced to race while the guards whipped them and made them sing.
The last prisoner to arrive faced the gas chamber. The weak prisoners of the camps also served as suppliers of blood and skin for wounded and burned German soldiers and officers. After several blood draws, the already weakened prisoners were doomed. The SS men and their henchmen also took particular pleasure in bullying women.
A tragic fate awaited virgin women, who were subjected to repeated rape that could last for hours as guards took turns. Guards forced prisoners to crawl over ground covered in stones, manure, and broken glass, leaving them smeared, cut, and exhausted. Jews and prisoners of war faced especially cruel conditions. In mid-January 1943, a memo from the head of the SMERSH, Viktor Abakumov, to the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, Andrei Vyshinsky, described an investigation into a transit camp for prisoners of war called Dulag 205.
In and around the camp, thousands of corpses of prisoners and commanders who died from exhaustion and cold were discovered. Several hundred tortured ex-servicemen, exhausted from hunger, were released. The investigation revealed that German officers and soldiers, following the instructions of the German military command, treated prisoners of war with humiliation and brutality, exterminating them through mass beatings, executions, unbearable living conditions, and starvation. The key phrase in this document is that these acts were carried out according to the instructions of the German military command.
This treatment was not merely tolerated by the authorities; it was ordered. The so-called kapos, policemen recruited from among the prisoners in exchange for better food, broke out gold crowns from the teeth of prisoners, both dead and alive. They then exchanged the gold with the SS guards for vodka. The SS men, the male half of the camp staff, were masters in the camp; their wishes were law for everyone, especially the prisoners.
The SS organized death races in which guards stood in two ranks facing each other, forming a corridor through which prisoners had to run. The guards struck or pushed them as they passed, and anyone who fell was killed on the spot. Crematoria and gas chambers worked almost non-stop. The use of the poisonous gas Zyklon B, hydrogen cyanide, was initiated by a certain Karl Fritzsch, who calculated that ten kilograms of gas was enough to destroy four thousand people.
In 1942, seven and a half tons of gas were supplied to Auschwitz, and in 1943, twelve and a half tons. Some gas chambers had special windows through which guards watched people being killed. At Auschwitz, Dr. Josef Mengele became infamous for his experiments.
He performed castration on boys and men without any anesthetic. One prisoner recalled seeing boys between nine and fourteen years old who had survived this terrible operation. They were later put to various jobs, but their gaze was lifeless, and they were apathetic and slow. He also tested the strength of women using electric shocks and pressure, and he experimented on the female uterus, injecting poisons, gases, and all kinds of infections into that organ.
The camps also maintained houses of prostitution, set up for kapos and low-ranking camp servants for motivation. Beautiful women were taken to separate barracks, where they were less often sent to work, their assignments were easier, and their food was slightly better, but their fate was unenviable. They had to serve several guards a night, and if a guard or kapo was displeased, the woman could be beaten or maimed. Often these women agreed to the role to protect their children, who were also in the camp.
In case of escape, the Germans applied collective responsibility: for one fugitive, ten prisoners could be killed. Punishment was also inflicted through roll calls that could last for hours. In Auschwitz, one such roll call lasted nearly twenty hours, and some exhausted prisoners could not reach their barracks on their own afterward. Decimation was also used, where lots were cast among hundreds of prisoners, and the unlucky ones, sometimes dozens or even a hundred, were sent to the gas chamber.
Torture by the “goat” involved a specially equipped machine to which a prisoner was tied and stretched, then beaten with a stick while forced to count the blows in German. If the prisoner lost count or made a mistake, the process began over. The Nazis also used gallows for entertainment. A prisoner or group of prisoners was led to the gallows, a noose was placed around their neck, a drum roll sounded, and a command was given, but the stool beneath them was only slightly kicked, leaving them hanging without dying.
The SS men were greatly amused by the sight of prisoners who had already said their final goodbyes to life. Two main causes explain the atrocities in the concentration camps and prisoner-of-war camps. The first was the agreement of the Nazi regime’s leaders to exterminate people by any means possible. The second was the manic tendencies of the camp staff themselves, whose impunity opened a wide field for their unhealthy impulses.
When American forces occupied Dachau and saw what was happening there, they began shooting the Nazis. The camp commandant, SS Sturmbannführer Heinrich Schwarz, was also shot in the first hour. In total, 122 SS men were killed, and forty more were subjected to reprisals by prisoners. An American court later found the actions of the US Army servicemen justified.
Ludwik, a Polish Jew and survivor of Auschwitz, later described it as a real hell, a vicious circle behind barbed wire from which there was no way out. Yet even in those inhumane conditions, he said, the prisoners did not lose faith in the victory of justice. They lived, fought, and died, but the Nazis failed to break their spirit.